In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead. One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home. Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed. The archai...
Aug 29, 2024•1 min•Ep. 198
John Dressel (b1934) I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. Like Hamlet, (who appeared in the previous post) Goliath has escaped the facts of his story. Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle’. The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as h...
Aug 23, 2024•57 sec•Ep. 197
Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) This is the first of a short run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what...
Aug 15, 2024•1 min•Ep. 196
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) I have been rereading Yeats. I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically. This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems’. It’s not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish b...
Aug 13, 2024•43 sec•Ep. 195
This poem is an extract from 'Talking to Cameras', the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles away, and ent to university in Birmingham. I've often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham. But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it...
Aug 07, 2024•1 min•Ep. 194
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential. At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he ...
Jul 14, 2023•2 min•Ep. 193
The second of these two poems was written in response to the first. A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he’s remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad’ , one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon’s classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle. Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1...
Jun 29, 2023•1 min•Ep. 192
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel 'Watt' where it’s set out as continuous prose. But it’s too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it’s not ‘a poem’. If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett’s prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. ...
Jun 19, 2023•4 min•Ep. 191
Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936 This isn’t one of Kipling’s best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here is probably apocryphal. The scorn in the last line depends on a play on the meanings of the word charge. It’s too vicious and carries too much contempt to call it a pun. The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. In what is sometimes remembered as one of history’s great military blunders, or stupidities, approximatel...
Jun 04, 2023•4 min•Ep. 190
This is taken from A Man of Heart, published by Shearsman press (2023) Maxim 1 History is a record of brutality tempered by outbursts of idealism. Memory There was never enough light. Even in summer, shade and shadows contour brightness. At night, torches and lamps shiver the edge of sight. The candle drew attention to itself while life continued in the silent, darker ebb and pool beyond. I remember her hand on the pillar, a shadow on the white stone. Her eyes bright in a dark face. She was worr...
May 26, 2023•1 min•Season 1Ep. 189
If you’d like to see the Middle English version I based this on: Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge. & þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe. Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin. Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide. þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone. what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede. Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic. he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her. Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen. whæt seið Rouwenn...
May 18, 2023•3 min•Season 1Ep. 188
This extract is taken from ‘A Man of Heart’ by Liam Guilar, published by Shearsman in January 2023. The Venerable Bede dated this event to 450 AD. The British, attacked on all sides, abandoned by Rome, hired mercenaries to help them to fight their enemies. Traditionally, they hired three boat loads of ‘Germanic Warriors’, led by Hengist and his brother, Horsa. On the beach watching them depart is his daughter, Rowena, who will play a significant role in subsequent events. Their story is told in ...
May 03, 2023•3 min•Ep. 187
Michael Alexander’s translations of Old English poetry, published by Penguin Classics, were my introduction to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. His translation of Beowulf, carefully preserving the alliterative sound of the poem, was a ‘best seller’ in the world of translations. ‘Beowulf Reduced’ is his tongue in cheek synopsis of the story, cutting three thousand lines down to fifteen. It was published in Alexander's 'Here At The Door' by Shoestring Press in 2021
Apr 26, 2023•46 sec•Ep. 186
Robert Browning (1812-1889) There’s a story. A bemused reader asked Browning what this poem meant. ‘Well,’ said the poet, ‘when I wrote it only God and Robert Browning knew. Now only God knows.’ Sadly this conversation didn’t take place, and the comment was most likely made by a character called Robert Browning in a play. But it’s worth keeping in mind. There’s nothing wrong with worrying about ‘what it means’ but a better question with this poem is what does it do to you while you hear it or re...
Dec 09, 2022•12 min•Season 1Ep. 185
Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28 Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work. Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English. Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no a...
Dec 05, 2022•53 sec•Season 1Ep. 184
Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941) I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and Allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties. While historians might debate the signifi...
Jul 03, 2022•33 sec•Ep. 183
I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova' on a previous podcast. Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history’. I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised t...
Jun 12, 2022•36 sec•Ep. 182
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) If it weren’t for the rhymes, this poem feels as though it could have been written by Thomas Hardy. Kipling could be tub thumpingly obvious when he wanted to be, riding a steady rhythm that takes his poems close to sing song. Here rhythm and rhyme are used to contribute to the way that he suggests a mood and a place and a story and leaves them to settle into the reader’s imagination.
Jun 04, 2022•59 sec•Ep. 181
Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966 ‘Requiem’ is Akhmatova’s memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, hoping for news of their loved ones during ‘the terrible years of the Yezhov Terror’. The context of the poem is explained properly in the second section, a prose ‘By way of a preface’. Some sections have titles, others numbers. This translation, by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward is taken from ‘Twentieth century Russian Poetry; Silver and steel, An anthol...
Jun 01, 2022•12 min•Ep. 180
The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a cluster he wrote later in life, and his friends took him at his word, clubbed together and made him a memorial which you can see in the picture. One cold December day in Dublin, before google maps, I set out to walk to the canal to find the statue. I found it, and Raglan Road which is near by, but that bench seat is metal. You have to be dedicated t...
Apr 07, 2022•59 sec•Ep. 179
Taliesin (6th Century) There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet. The Book of Taliesin is one o...
Apr 06, 2022•1 min•Ep. 178
Alun Lewis (1915-1944) Considered by some to be one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war. This is his take on the myth of Leda and the Swan. Zeus turns himself into a swan to rape leda, and Helen of Troy is born. It’s been a subject in art since Classical times. Yeats wrote a fine poem on the same subject. But in Lewis’ version the God disguised as Swan is stricken by an understanding of what he’s done. Such remorse rarely figures in either the pictures or the st...
Mar 10, 2022•37 sec•Ep. 177
Two poems, written some years apart. The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed. These heroics number one is takes from I’ll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave. Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com (A note on pronunciation. There...
Feb 25, 2022•2 min•Ep. 176
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. naturally, it had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape. The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were i...
Feb 19, 2022•1 min•Ep. 175
Susan Watson The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time’ and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding’. And there...
Feb 09, 2022•2 min•Ep. 174
William Blake (1757-1827) For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and position amongst some critics was established. He can still seem like a peripheral character who became lost in his own private mythology. There’s an odd sense generated in some corners of poetry world that you have to like or admire certain poets. As much as I admire this particular poem, and it is undeniably a great poem and a fine work of social cri...
Feb 01, 2022•54 sec•Ep. 173
Byron in Venice (The poet in exile) The debris of a city in decline slops at the crumbling steps, as the sun sets over palaces even dusk can’t dignify. The clock strikes, he puts down the page and calls for servants. Suddenly cannot remember if he is to meet the opera singer or the serving maid. No matter how elaborate the choreography, his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme. Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax and scrawl defiance on the blank ...
Jan 18, 2022•1 min•Ep. 172
Miroslav Holub, (1923 –1998) Holub lived in Prague, and worked as an immunologist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Immunology of Nude Mice’. His obituary appeared in the New York Times. He also wrote wonderful poems. ‘Napoleon’ is also on the Poetry Voice, and as with that poem, versions of history collide, and the wit and the critical point will make themselves apparent if you let them. This translation is taken from Heaney and Hughes’ ‘The Rattle Bag’ and the translation is by George Theiner....
Jan 13, 2022•1 min•Ep. 171
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) It’s one of the superficial oddities of English poetry that the First World War produced an enormous amount of poetry, some of which has entered the Canon, while the Second didn’t. It’s only a superficial oddity,; culture and education had changed dramatically. However, this short poem, by the American poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, is one of the most memorable poems written in the twentieth century about war. Part of the horror of the poem lies in the unemotional ...
Jan 11, 2022•26 sec•Ep. 170
You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work. Unfortunately it won’t let me link directly to the poem: Click on this link…which will open a new window. http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/ eng /3win.php Choose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio’ link at the bottom of the page....
Jan 06, 2022•1 min•Ep. 169
